Closing A Cathedral

I am grieved.  Three days ago I revisited an old sanctuary, our universities Olympic size swimming pool, where I had swam laps every day for 19 years.  Very few of us have a place outside our homes that we visit every day for years; those places become something of a church for us, a sacred space.  Two years ago our university closed our pool for money reasons, drained the water, covered the windows and locked the doors.  A student of mine had asked to do her art project there and so here I stood looking down at the white tiled floor of the massive formal rectangle in the earth where I had prayed for years, each lap spent bringing a specific person before God—19 years of praying immersed in cold blue water gliding silently along.  Class continued on while I was a million miles above in The Throne Room grieving before God at the terrible loss to my living.  “What a waste!” I said, “it’s just like we got out of the pool, took our shower and left as they pulled the plug and locked the door behind us leaving it just the way it was two years ago minus the water!”  The chairs along the wall were still askew, the buoy ring still in place, the lifeguard chair now rusting away in the residual chlorine air, quiet as a cathedral, empty as a tomb.  It was the empty formal hole that shocked me.  A basilica had become a hole, a sanctuary empty, a prayer chapel with no more incense.  Sometime we loose something of great worth and act as if we had simply turned a page—but instead—we have closed a cathedral.